Issue 20—2021

R. Barton Palmer

Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature Emeritus
Clemson University

R. Barton Palmer is Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature Emeritus at Clemson University, where he founded the World Cinema program and served as its first director. He has worked with the Tennessee Williams Annual Review as a contributor for more than two decades and assumed the role of editor in 2017. With Robert Bray he published Hollywood’s Tennessee: The Williams Films and Postwar America and edited the multiauthor volume Modern American Drama on Screen. Recently, with Homer B. Pettey, he published ReFocus: The Literary Films of Richard Brooks. Palmer has published widely on US and world cinema history, on topics including film noir, film theory, and directors such as the Coen Brothers, Michael Mann, Steven Soderbergh, and Michael Curtiz, among others. An award-winning editor and translator of medieval French poetry, he published the edited volume Allegory and the Poetic Self: First-Person Narration in Late Medieval Literature in 2022. Palmer also serves as the editor of the South Atlantic Review and is a book series editor at a number of academic presses.

John S. Bak

Université de Lorraine (France)

John S. Bak, Professor at the Université de Lorraine in France, holds degrees from the universities of Illinois and Ball State and the Sorbonne. A former Fulbright scholar to the Czech Republic in 1995, he has been a visiting fellow at Harvard (2011), Columbia (2013), the University of Texas (2014), and Oxford (2014–16). His books on Williams include Tennessee Williams and Europe (2014), Tennessee Williams: A Literary Life (2013), New Selected Essays: Where I Live (2009), and Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, and Queer Masculinities (2009).

Barbara Neri

Barbara Neri is a writer, scholar, and multidisciplinary artist. Her critical and creative writing can be found in Victorian Poetry, Performance Research, and TDR/The Drama Review, among other publications. She is associate editor of The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (2010) and is currently finishing a book on Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese. Neri’s award-winning screenplay Sonnets from the Portuguese reenvisions Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning’s romance for contemporary audiences. Her play Unlocking Desire premiered in Detroit in 2011, and her screen adaptation of the work won the 2017 Marfa Film Festival Screenplay Competition. Her latest screenplay, The Forgotten Front, tells the story of Katharine Cornell’s World War II USO tour of Italy.

Tennessee Williams

Raymond-Jean Frontain

Professor of English
University of Central Arkansas

Raymond-Jean Frontain is professor of English at the University of Central Arkansas. Among his recent publications are The Theater of Terrence McNally: Something about Grace (2019) and an edition of McNally’s writings about theater titled Muse of Fire (2020). He is currently at work on a study of Williams’s sexual ethic.

Jeffrey B. Loomis

Professor Emeritus in English
Northwest Missouri State University

Jeffrey B. Loomis is professor emeritus in English at Northwest Missouri State University. Author of Dayspring in Darkness: Sacrament in Hopkins, he has also published several previous essays on Tennessee Williams, as well as journal articles on Howe, Shakespeare, Strindberg, Goethe, Albee, Shaffer, Zindel, Sondheim, Woolf, and Flannery O’Connor.

John Rowell

John Rowell’s research focuses on rhetoric and composition, with an emphasis on speech act theory in theater. He currently teaches in the greater Vancouver, British Columbia, area at Columbia College and Douglas College and is a contributor to the 1001 Steps Theatre Society based in White Rock, British Columbia.

Annette J. Saddik

Professor of Theatre and Literature
City University of New York and
New York City College of Technology

Annette J. Saddik is CUNY Distinguished Professor of Theatre and Literature, with a dual teaching appointment at the Graduate Center PhD Program in Theatre and New York City College of Technology Department of English. She specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century drama and performance, particularly the work of Tennessee Williams, and has published four books, as well as numerous essays in scholarly journals, international theater playbills, newspapers, anthologies, and encyclopedias. Her most recent book, Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess: The Strange, The Crazed, The Queer (2015), contextualizes Williams’s plays through what she terms a “theatre of excess,” which seeks liberation through grotesque exaggeration, chaos, and ambivalent laughter. Saddik lectures and advises on productions both nationally and internationally as a dramaturge, participates regularly in audience “talk-backs” for Broadway and Off-Broadway performances, and serves on the boards of academic journals and as a voter for the Lucille Lortel Theatre Awards. She is currently working on her fifth book, Clowning Around? Reimagining Political Transformation in Late-Twentieth-Century Grotesque Theatre, which centers on the ambiguous figure of the clown as a site of resistance and transformation in plays that reacted to systems of oppression on various continents during the second half of the twentieth century.

2021 Tennessee Williams Annual Review Cover